[I] would be betting against all the “native client” worlds — AAA game worlds included. Against anything that involves too much of a fantasy identity. Against anything that relies on people playing together in real time. It’s just not where the action is for the next several years. Virtual places as they exist now cannot be a mass medium any more than a single restaurant can... Short form: virtual worlds are dead, long live the world, virtual. [Emph. his]

This view, as you might guess, includes Second Life:

Something like Second Life struggles to gain mainstream adoption because flatter pseudo-places can offer so much of what it does, and the very real benefits it offers are only benefits to a segment of the audience that wants either the pseudonymity, or the placeness, or the chat.

Friday, February 26, 2010

This week Linden Lab announced an NEA-style Linden Endowment for the Arts program, which is a great initiative in itself, and it's also kicked up some larger questions worth asking. One immediate controversy: Does live music performed in Second Life qualify as art? In that regard, Crap Mariner has a rant on his blog, expressing a tension in the arts community between performers like her and some 3D builders who disregard live performance in-world. Or as he calls them, "Prim Supremacists", who "[dismiss] music as just one guy with a guitar playing on a stage, or saying that music should be separated out into its own area." If you follow a real world criterion, performing arts are usually considered a related but distinct form from other mediums -- painting, sculpture, and so on. (Maybe a possible solution is to create a sub-category of the LEA called Linden Endowment for the Performing Arts.) And to be sure, it's definitely true that most SL musicians don't really integrate the medium into their show, offering only a simulation of a real world show. (Performers like Grace McDunnough and Chouchou are exceptions.) Nothing wrong with that at all, of course. Then again, a lot of 3D sculptures don't strike me as any more artistic in a Second Life sense -- only simulations of a real world sculpture. (And nothing wrong with that either.)

All of which raises the even larger question: What is art in Second Life? That's far from being a resolved question, though some have taken early stabs. (DC Spensley's "Hyperformalism" is a pioneering approach.) For the most part, with Second Life art, we're still in the "I can't define it, but I know it when I'm immersed in it" stage. To start things out, here's a rough-and-ready definition to build on:

Second Life art is art that attempts to essentialize an important aspect of the human experience in a way that's only feasible in SL, leveraging most or all of Second Life's unique affordances.

What an awkward mouthful. Got a better definition? Doubtless you do. Discuss over the weekend!

Mariko Nightfire was a well-written and illustrated travelogue post on a recreation of Mont St. Michel in Second Life [SLURL], created by Moeka Kohime in such loving detail that the restaurants on the island have condiments, for god's sake. Then again, you're often likely to find such painstaking attention and care throughout the grid. As Mariko puts it: "Go to the map of Second Life, zoom out, and watch the islands and sims become as stars in a galaxy of multitudious stars. And know that each star in this galaxy is the creative work of some person or group of persons."

Fridays I usually devote to covering Second Life bloggers (if there's enough noteworthy posts that week.) Read any SL blog posts recently that deserve special attention? Please post URL and description in Comments. Can be any topic related to SL, including the 2.0 viewer, fashion spreads, tutorials, sim reviews, and more.

The new Second Life viewer comes with a shared media function which lets you put interactive web content on SL objects. The possibilities, of course, are endless. You can, for instance, put a website with a whiteboard program on it, and collaboratively draw on it. That's pretty ninja. Still more ninja is this hack from Giulio Prisco: Put your live webcam stream on a prim, and put that prim on your avatar's head. Now you have live video of your facial reactions as you interact in Second Life, broadcast into Second Life where your virtual head should be. Can you think of an even more ninja application of the shared media function than that? (Hat tip: Jeanricard Broek.)

More curiously, Ms. Back tells the UK Independent her SL occupation: “I make a living out of stripping there – it’s really easy money.” (Just another example of unpredictable avatar identity in Second Life. Sometimes, a virtual stripper will also be a transhumanist Kurzweil fan; other times, as it turns out, she'll be a famous couture designer who spends much of her real life with naked supermodels.)

And while her latest line seems fairly inventive, Ann-Sofie Back's general view of Second Life doesn't seem as inspired. She tells the Independent:

On February 27th beginning at 3:30 pm SLT, the Erie Isle Roleplay Community will host the Second Life premiere of the award-winning documentary "Lovecraft: Fear of the Unknown" , a chronicle of the life and work of science fiction author HP Lovecraft. This film won Best Documentary at the 2008 Comic Con International and features interviews with top horror writers and filmmakers such as John Carpenter, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo del Toro, S.T. Joshi, Ramsey Campbell, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Andrew Migliore, Robert M. Price, Peter Straub, and Stuart Gordon.

Plans for this special event include a screening of the movie, a live Q&A session with the filmmakers, a Lovecraft themed costume contest, and more. The public is invited as the filmmakers, Wyrd Studios creative partners Frank H. Woodward, James B. Myers, and William Janczewski join the Erie Isle characters and their guests in-world for the evening. In Erie Isle. [SLurl teleport at this link]

Also after the break: Virtual Haiti Fundraising Ball, Music to Honor Sojourner's Legacy, SF Bay Area Musicians Jam at The Pocket and much much more